Justified
by Circle of Fire
Summary: Hawke in the aftermath.


_First post by a fanfic newbie. Be gentle!_

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When I dream, I dream of fire. When it is over, the only thing left inside me is pain.

My sister is dead, my mother, brother, my household scattered to the winds. All that I fought for lies in ruin, trampled. I cannot take a step without crushing the dying embers of your cause under my feet.

Justified.

I am so full of rage I cannot allow any softness to touch me. I cleanse you from my body with the affections of others. It is better when it hurts, pain to drive out the weakness, to serve as the anvil on which to temper myself. Would that it shattered me completely.

We hurt each other in back rooms and dark alleys, furious and frantic without an ounce of tenderness. Unfettered by promises and inconvenient affections, or so we let ourselves believe. I swell within my skin, feeling as though at any moment my flesh will burn away, leaving behind nothing but raw hate and charred bones.

I gave myself to him, then, and when he loved me I flung myself at others. There are many I do not remember, only that I used them to try to forget.

I no longer sleep at night now, and my eyes burn with tears that I cannot shed. I feel them in my chest, bundled up like molten lead, boiling through my veins. I pray, wordlessly plead, to be scorched, burned, cleaned of this, volunteering my soul to the flames to be purified. My answer comes in silence. I cannot confess, cannot force my lips to shape the words.

There is nothing to balm this blister, and it rots inside me like a canker. You have taken everything from me but this.

I pace, and my boots wear trails in the scuffing floorboards. There is much I want to say to you, to scream, to pound my fists into your chest and force you to take it back, take it all back. To make it how it was, before, when we were happy. Before, when I was not alone, my voice choked out by the things that I cannot say. But you are gone.

You are gone, and only I am to blame.

I miss you. Most nights, I miss you more than I hate you, staring up at the empty sky and remembering how a pillar of red light shone against it as a rain of stone fell over the city. Remembering how denial welled up in my throat like blood from a pinpricked finger, even while terror smothered it, kept it still. The anger of the others, their despair lapping against me like waves.

I close my eyes. Let me be stone. Stone, stone. Let me root here like a pillar and hold up the sky, while the world tumbles down around us.

I miss you, I miss you. I miss your arms to hold me, your fingers to brush the hair from my eyes. I have shorn it close to the flesh to exorcise the memory.

I have always been good with sharp edges, good with my hands, and when it came, the end was quick. I would not have had you suffer at the hands of others, not when I could not breathe for the sight of you. To know that this is what you planned severed me. The knife went in, the knife came out, and you spilled your blood onto my hands, in my arms, at my feet. I could say nothing. I may as well have swallowed that blade; nothing else could have cut me so cleanly in two.

In my head I scream, an endless wordless litany, howling like a beast in agony. The rightness of what I had done. The deep regret that could not be parted from it.

I killed a monster, and wished that the Maker had taken me instead.

How could you do this? How could you leave me? You have murdered me here, left me a wraith inside this empty shell, and there is nothing I can do to punish you for it. Only myself. Only I am left now. Only me.

I am cursed.

In the evening when I return to my room to sew up new rents in my flesh and lick my wounds, I miss you more than I hate you, it is true. But the days...

The fate you left me to is cruel, and so is this body. Like a machine, so coldly capable. Every day I stalk death, courting it like an errant lover, and every day it denies me. Why I cannot bring myself to throw myself on the sword, I do not know. I crave the kiss of a blade across my wrists, and even as I sit, alone, your dagger in my lap, I cannot force my hands to obey.

I visit my sister's grave and it is cold comfort, like the slab of stone she is buried under. My fame grows; I am unstoppable. Our companions leave me, finally, their care exhausted by the aloof automaton that looks through them without seeing. It is no loss to me; my name brings me more of these friends, until I no longer know what or who I am fighting for.

I make new enemies, I take on new causes, invent some even when the outpouring of blood from my hands slows to a trickle. I take risks, far too many, and endanger those within my care. And every day I beg to be betrayed, for a sweet sharp edge to finally sever what is left of me, clinging here to this flesh. Whatever fragment this is that you left behind.

I no longer see myself in the mirror, behind cold, tired eyes. Only the stranger there, guilt, and the monster it has become.

Justice, too, has died with you, and I am alone.


End file.
